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Predicting the future of ecosystems requires a plethora of accurate data available in real-time.

To enable real-time data collection, three Virginia Tech researchers have received a prestigious five-year National Science Foundation grant to help better predict the future of ecosystems.

The $450,000 Long-Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) grant will support the enhancement and continuation of field monitoring and data sharing at two freshwater drinking water supply reservoirs in Roanoke.

This grant will allow the researchers to create a cutting-edge, ecological monitoring program with real-time data access and publishing, which normally takes weeks to years after data collection.

We are developing one of the first open-source automated forecasting systems in the world by using the reservoirs as a test bed for exploring new data collection, data access, and forecasting methods, said Cayelan Carey, professor and the Roger Moore and Mejdeh Khatam-Moore Faculty Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences. We will use our new designation as an official long-term research environmental biology monitoring site as a platform for scaling and disseminating our data so that other researchers can similarly start to forecast water quality in lakes and reservoirs around the globe.

The LTREB program is one of the National Science Foundations premier environmental science programs to support long-term monitoring at select exemplar terrestrial, coastal, and freshwater ecosystems across the U.S.

Carey leads the Virginia Reservoirs LTREB team with Professor Madeline Schreiber in the Department of Geosciences and Associate Professor Quinn Thomas, who has a joint appointment in the Departments of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation and Biological Sciences.

With a group of co-mentored students, technicians, and postdoctoral researchers, Carey, Schreiber, and Thomas have been monitoring biological, chemical, and physical metrics of water quality in the two reservoirs for the past decade in partnership with the Western Virginia Water Authority, which owns and manages the reservoirs for drinking water.

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Researchers receive National Science Foundation grant for long-term data research - Virginia Tech